Wednesday, August 01, 2012

Looking around for a trendy watch, I realized that the 2012 lines of fashionable watches seem to live in our time: they are getting outlandishly overweight if not obese. They are heavy to lug around, cumbersome at best and unrealistically hard to hide under the cuff. And I noticed too that the trend extends to women’s wrists. Are they the reflection of the world going fat? Amidst this epidemic of bigness in the world of telling time, it is nice to come across the thin, fine lines of a Piaget watch. Has it been in a pseudo South Beach diet that it is able to keep its shape through the years? But a Piaget is a Piaget, which means, if anything is surprising about this classy brand, it is not its thinness. It introduced the ultra-thin mechanical movement in watches back in the sixties, when it brought out the Calibre12P, which at 2.3 mm is the world’s thinnest automatic movement as affirmed in the Guinness Book of Records. Not to say that thinness is all there is to a watch; yet when you know that it is harder to create a thin watch than a bulky one, a Piaget stands out. It takes better engineering, a more sophisticated craftsmanship—honed since the 1870s when Piaget was founded in a quaint Swiss town—so that the fine lines and precise movement is a “harmony at the heart of a Piaget watch,” so said George Piaget, the founder.